The former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his wife, Carla Bruni, are suing for breach of privacy after conversations recorded by a close political adviser were made public .

Sarkozy was said to be upset and disappointed after the tapes made by Patrick Buisson, a controversial aide who persuaded the former leader to move further to the right during his failed 2012 re-election campaign, were published by a satirical magazine.

Lawyers for the former French leader said they will seek an injunction to stop more recordings being published.

The tapes are more embarrassingly banal than damaging. In one, Sarkozy is heard joking that he is a "kept man" after marrying the wealthy supermodel-turned-singer Bruni, while she complains that her status as first lady is stopping her doing lucrative advertising campaigns for "anti-wrinkle creams".

"Julia Roberts, 44, Sharon Stone, 52, Julianne Moore, 53: they all get huge contracts, but I can't accept them right now. It's not the done thing," she is heard saying.

"I've turned you into a kept man … and there I was thinking I'd married a guy with a salary."

"I got rich by getting married," Sarkozy replies.

In other tapes, advisers remark on the unhelpful presence of Bruni at meetings discuss plans for a cabinet reshuffle, while Sarkozy describes some of his colleagues as "nuls" (idiots).

They were made in 2011, a year before Sarkozy lost the presidential election to François Hollande. They were published in the weekly paper the Canard Enchainé on Wednesday.

Buisson has denied leaking them and is also taking legal action, claiming they were stolen and used illegally.

His lawyer, Gilles-William Goldnadel, denied claims that Buisson had secretly recorded Sarkozy and Bruni with a dictaphone in his pocket during meetings, and insisted that Sarkozy knew he was being recorded.

"The Elysée is not a church … others take notes," Goldnadel told French journalists.

In a statement to Reuters, Goldnadel added: "Mr Buisson, as an essential participant in meetings, was unable to take written notes and used these recordings in order to prepare for the next meeting."

He denied Buisson had betrayed the former president and insisted the published tapes had been "stolen and put to extravagant and perverse use".

The political scandal, nicknamed Sarkoleaks, comes at a time when Sarkozy's opposition centre-right UMP party is facing damaging allegations that its leader Jean-François Copé gave lucrative contracts to a company run by friends. Copé has denied the claims.

On Wednesday, the same day as the Canard Enchainé leaked the tapes, police searched the offices of Sarkozy's lawyer, Thierry Hertzog, as part of an investigation into alleged illegal political donations made by the heir to the L'Oréal fortune, Liliane Bettencourt.

Sarkozy has been dropping increasingly heavy hints of a possible political return to challenge Hollande in 2017.